Thanks for the expansion of the analogy. I like that. Did I see it coming? Yes. Did I feel it might be averted? Yes to that, also. Likely? Well, it's hard to put percentages on something like that, but I don't think I would have or did call it likely. If people didn't jump ship, it would have helped, but it's hard for me to blame them. But it's not unreasonable to say - as you did - that the strength of the community pushed us into more versions than there might have been. There were those who acted surprised when the EOL decision finally hit. I was surprised that they were surprised.

Anticipating and positioning should not be an emotional issue, as you say. It's just emotional when a fellow member blames the others for something where the root cause was out of our hands. It's hard to want to leave VFP with its great OO, its great data handling capabilities, its concise and noncryptic language, etc. I don't see anything else as good. And you have to tell your clients - not now, really, but at some point - that VFP is not viable anymore and they will need to rewrite. Why is that? Not because VFP couldn't do the job, but because M$ wants to extract more money from the market and it can do that better with VS and SQL Server. So my recommendation will be for them to go with non-M$ solutions that have been broadly adopted and since I have been working with them for years and years, I think they will heed that advice.

>Well, for what it's worth I agree with you that MS decision re VFP had almost nothing to do with the VFP community - unless it was to prolong it about three versions longer than they might have otherwise. But the handwriting was on the wall for a loooong time.
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>Going back to your analogy of getting whacked upside the head with a board - MS picked up the board and some people said "Hey, they've got a board. Maybe trouble" and the people who didn't want to believe it said "Shhhhh, if they hear you they'll swing" and then people yelled "Lookout, they're swinging" and got out of the way and the people who stayed in the path said "You guys are the reason they're swinging" and then the board whacked the people in it's path and they blamed the people who told them the board was coming. I don't blame the people who got whacked for the actions of the whacker, but I sure question their judgment in not seeing it coming and thinking it would have hurt less if everyone else had stayed.
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>I just don't see figuring business trends and positioning oneself for the future to be an emotional issue. And advising others can be done for all kinds of motives, but sometimes the motive isn't as important as, ultimately, the quality of the advice.
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>>> all my life-and-death animosity in situations that were *really* life and death
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>>Yeah, that truly is a factor, isn't it? Perhaps I did get overly bent out of shape, but I didn't say treasonous or enemy. I just found it insulting that he pegs part of the blame on the community. I don't think he has a leg to stand on there.